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Squamish photographer captures ‘great stone cathedrals of our landscape’

Collection of mountain images is showing at the Squamish Adventure Centre
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Photographer Cory Sine with Jet-Stream, an 18”x36” wood-mounted photo depicting Atwell Peak and Mount Garibaldi, outside the Squamish Adventure Centre, the venue for his latest exhibit

The Stawamus Chief is a chameleon of stone. Its faces and slopes turn golden, blue, purple, grey and deep red depending on the time, season and weather.

At times it is a foreboding presence – always so urgently present, demanding to be seen, and looming in progressively larger profile as the passerby draws nearer to its base.  

At other times its Grand Wall is a furnace of golden light while sunset glints in the snow clinging to its features giving the illusion of an inner-fire defying the very cold which surrounds it.

This is the way Cory Sine, a local photographer and writer, eloquently describes Squamish’s most famous landmark. 

When taking photos, he examines the history and delves into the aura of each secluded spot. 

Alpine Attitudes, a collection of his wilderness and mountain photographs, caught on long exposure with a Canon 70D, is on display at Squamish Adventure Centre until Sept. 19. 

The beauty and spirituality of the mountains surrounding Sine’s downtown home – The Chief, the Diamond Head peak of Mount Garibaldi and the Tantalus Range – are the focus of the show. 

“For me, it’s almost a sense of revelation to learn something from the mountains,” says Sine, who didn’t leave film behind until 2009, a late date for most photographers. 

“Using film forced me not to rely on what you can easily do with digital like make the photo lighter or darker. 

“It made me understand how to work with the environment and use it to my advantage.” 

With a simple 35-milimetre point-and-shoot in hand, Sine took up photography when he was in elementary school. 

He started Panoptikon Photography four years ago and began studying the importance of the landscape in Squamish and the Sea-to-Sky Corridor to the community and in First Nations’ history. 

“I view the mountains as the great stone cathedrals of our landscape,” he says, adding that his favourite alpine location is Brew Mountain where there is a cozy hut below the summit. 

“There are few things in this world I enjoy more than waking up in the pre-dawn light in such a place and taking in the cool, clean mountain air before the sun crests from behind the Black Tusk.”

Alpine Attitudes features six new pieces in a variety of media – matted and framed, wood-mounted and metal-mounted – along with short essays on the three areas with Sine’s personal interpretation of what these mountains mean to him as a photographer and a proud resident of Sea to Sky country. 

Visit panoptikonphotography.com to see more of Sine’s work. 

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